Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B—21 Jul 2024
Reverend Susanna Pain
Mark 6.30-34, 6.53-56
As I speak, I invite you to hold the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd.
The disciples were exhausted and excited. They had been commissioned to go out there and be Jesus’ people healing and teaching. They came back thrilled about all that had been achieved, and Jesus realised they needed rest. ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while’, he said. They must’ve been so relieved, and a little puzzled. But they went and there were met with more people in need.
Jesus taught them all, we read. What did he teach, I wonder? What did they need to learn? Something about God’s way? And he healed. Jesus was living God’s way of healing and compassion. And don’t we need that in our world today, rest, healing and compassion.
What might rest look like for you? I know one who plays the piano to rest, others who cook or garden or sew. Nikolai loves watching sport to rest his active mind. I walk in the bush, or dance. I meditate.
I love the way that Jesus advocates both contemplation and action.
I am part of the Benedictus Contemplative Church whose very core is silence and stillness and meditation. We meditate every morning and evening with others on zoom, and in our service on Saturday night we include 15 minutes of silence. In the Benedictus Community there are many contemplatives whose primary role is to pray, and there are many people who are activists working with refugees and homeless people, working for the environment. People seem to appreciate the balance between silence and action. In July, Benedictus is having a ‘sabbath month’, a month where we let go of all things that can be let go of, meetings and some of our groups and we have simplified our meditations and ourselves. The aim is to open up space for being more aware, being closer to the divine, to God.
Richard Carter of the Nazareth Community writes on the theme of Sabbath his book, The City is My Monastery.[1] Richard writes:
Creation is not complete until God rests on the seventh day and contemplates all creation. When we rest, we imitate God—we enter into the rhythm of God’s time. In order to do that we need to disconnect from our compulsive busyness. Sabbath is like a recalibration. And if Sabbath is God’s time, it does not end in the keeping of the Sabbath—the Sabbath enters into all our time. When we keep Sabbath, everything we do can be infused with that sense of God’s presence. Each day there can be Sabbath spaces which reconnect our immortal souls with our reason for living. Each of our silent times can become windows of this Sabbath time infusing the day with God’s time: opening up a new dimension of our lives.
I will be interested to hear at the end of the month how people have found this Sabbath month.
‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ Jesus does that often, especially in Mark’s gospel. Where all is urgent and immediate, Jesus rests.
When we don’t rest, we become ill. Rest and action, not either/or but both/and.
How is it with you right now? Do you need more rest, or action? Listen to your body. Jesus models both rest, Sabbath, and action.
His action is mostly teaching and healing. I believe it is our work to be healers in the world, leaning into God the healer. If you are a lawyer, if you are an accountant, if you are a builder, if you are a grandmother, if you are an academic or musician, how do you heal? What does healing look like? How does your life bring healing to others?
What do you know about prayer for healing? What is your experience? I know that when I worked as a massage therapist, I felt that I was a conduit for God’s healing love. I let the energy flow through me using all my gifts and skills, and I know that made a difference. I pray often for healing, for Grace for so many people and sometimes I notice the difference. Sometimes I don’t. I remember praying for someone in a hospital bed, and he noticed he was enfolded in light. I spend most of my time listening for God in people’s lives.
Frederick Buechner has some pertinent thoughts on healing.[2] He says:
The gospels depict Jesus as having spent a surprising amount of time healing people. Although, like the author of Job before him, he specifically rejected the theory that sickness was God’s way of getting even with sinners (John 9:1-3), he nonetheless seems to have suggested a connection between sickness and sin, almost to have seen sin as a kind of sickness. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick;” he said. “I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mark 2:17).
This is entirely compatible, of course, with the Hebrew view of the human being as a psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul in which if either goes wrong, the other is affected.
Jesus is reported to have made the blind see and the lame walk, and over the centuries countless miraculous healings have been claimed in his name. Buechner continues perhaps lightly, tongue in cheek. Showing up pejorative thinking about healing, he says:
For those who prefer not to believe in healings, a number of approaches are possible, among them:
1. The idea of miracles is an offence both to our reason and to our dignity. Thus, a priori, miracles don’t happen.
2. Unless there is objective medical evidence to substantiate the claim that a miraculous healing has happened, you can assume it hasn’t.
3. If the medical authorities agree that a healing is inexplicable in terms of present scientific knowledge, you can simply ascribe this to the deficiencies of present scientific knowledge.
4. If otherwise intelligent and honest human beings are convinced, despite all arguments to the contrary, that it is God who has healed them, you can assume that their sickness, like its cure, was purely psychological. Whatever that means.
5. The crutches piled high at Lourdes and elsewhere are a monument to human humbug and credulity.
If your approach to this kind of healing is less ideological and more empirical, you can always give it a try. Pray for it. If it’s somebody else’s healing you’re praying for, you can try at the same time laying your hands on her as Jesus sometimes did. If her sickness involves her body as well as her soul, then God may be able to use your inept hands as well as your inept faith to heal her. (wink, wink, nod, nod).
If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don’t let it throw you. You are a fool, of course, only not a damned fool for a change.
If your prayer isn’t answered, this may tell you more about you and your prayer than it does about God. Don’t try too hard to feel religious, to generate some healing power of your own. Think of yourself instead (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge clogged-up pipe that a little of God’s power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough. Tell the one you’re praying for to stay loose too.,br>
If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe God’s giving you something else . . .
Bruce Epperly suggests that Mark joins contemplation and action in the healing process. He says that those who serve Christ must take time for prayer; we must nourish the connections that enable us to experience the lost and broken as brothers and sisters rather than nuisances and nobodies. (Crossan) We must recognize our own need of healing and wholeness, rather than presume unlimited energy and effectiveness apart from God’s grace. Further, in contemplation we go beyond healer and beneficiary to experience the unity of all peoples, sick and well, unclean and clean, foreign and fraternal. Ultimately in God’s healing providence, we are all connected. In sharing God’s energy with others, we are energised. The well-being of others advances our own well-being. We are all connected in that dynamic body of Christ, God’s beloved community that embraces everyone.[3]
Healing and rest.
I conclude with a fragment of The Curly Pyjama Letters by Michael Leunig—correspondence between lone voyager Vasco Pyjama and his friend and mentor Mr Curly of Curly Flat.
Dear Vasco,
In response to your question “What is worth doing and what is worth having?” I would like to say simply this. It is worth doing nothing and having a rest; in spite of all the difficulty it may cause, you must rest Vasco—otherwise you will become RESTLESS!
Tiredness is one of our strongest, most noble and instructive feelings. It is an important aspect of our CONSCIENCE and must be heeded or else we will not survive. When you are tired you must HAVE that feeling and you must act upon it sensibly—you MUST rest like the trees and animals do. Yet tiredness has become a matter of shame! This is a dangerous development. Tiredness has become the most suppressed feeling in the world. Everywhere we see people overcoming their exhaustion and pushing on with intensity—cultivating the great mass mania which all round is making life so hard and so ugly—so cruel and meaningless—so utterly graceless—and being congratulated for overcoming it and pushing it deep down inside themselves as if it were a virtue to do this. And of course, Vasco, you know what happens when such strong and natural feelings are denied—they turn into the most powerful and bitter poisons with dreadful consequences. We live in a world of these consequences and then wonder why we are so unhappy.
So I gently urge you Vasco, do as we do in Curly Flat—learn to curl up and rest—feel your noble tiredness—learn about it and make a generous place for it in your life and enjoyment will surely follow. I repeat: it’s worth doing nothing and having a rest.
yours sleepily,
Mr. Curly XXX [4]
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1. Richard Carter. The City is my Monastery: A Contemporary Rule of Life. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2019.
2. https://www.frederickbuechner.com/weeklysermonillustrations/2024/7/8/weekly-sermon-illustration-healing
3. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2012/07/the-adventurous-lectionary-eighth-sunday-after-pentecost/
4. Michael Leunig. The Curly Pyjama Letters. Viking Penguin, 2001, pp. 26–28.